SWAZILAND’S INTERNET CON TRICK

I think there may be a bit of a confidence trick being played on Swazis at the moment.

Both Swaziland’s daily newspapers today (24 September 2008) carry reports that the Swazi parastatal the Swaziland Posts and Telecommunication Corporation (SPTC) is to launch a broadband internet service in the kingdom.

Welcome news. I know from my own experience that it is almost impossible to get an internet connection in Swaziland, except during the dead of night or on Sunday mornings when everyone else is at church. If you are really lucky you can get up enough speed to get into your email account, but don’t expect to be able to download much and you’ll never be able to listen to audio or watch video online.

So SPTC’s boast that it is to launch (an extremely expensive, I might add) a ‘broadband’ service seems like welcome news.

The Swazi Observer reports SPTC Corporate Affairs Manager Lindiwe Dlamini saying that ‘Broadband will bring world markets to the homes of Swazis. This new infrastructure has an economic spin-off for both small and big business. It will also assist in government's decentralisation process as it will provide more connectivity to rural areas and enable them to perform work that's being done in offices in Mbabane, for instance.’

For someone struggling on the Internet in Swaziland this sounds too good to be true. And as we all know if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Unfortunately, the level of technical expertise of Swaziland journalists is almost non-existent, so none of them realised SPTC was selling them a pup.

The Times of Swaziland did at least tell the readers the technical details. It reported that SPTC’s broadband would allow a customer to ‘download 128 kilobytes per second (kbps)’.

Like the Observer, the Times concentrate on the marketing sell, claiming it would benefit small and medium sized enterprises.

Now, for the truth. A speed of 128kbps is not a ‘broadband’ connection. It is just a little bit faster than what we have already. In Swaziland I have managed to achieve top speeds on the Internet of about 30kbps, so this new speed is an improvement but it won’t deliver SPTC’s claim.

There seems to me to be a deliberate attempt on the part of SPTC to mislead the public. Nowhere in the world would 128kbps be described as ‘broadband’. Technically, the term ‘broadband’ simply refers to a high speed internet connection, but in the past unscrupulous companies have been caught out misleading customers about what they could achieve with their internet connections.

In the UK, where I come from, as long ago as 2003 companies that claimed an internet connection of 200 kbps (vastly more than SPTC offers) was ‘broadband’ were discredited. Even then, five years ago, ‘broadband’ was generally considered to start at 500kbps.

Today, a typical broadband connection in the UK would be in the region of at least 2,000kbps (or 2mb). In some areas of the country it is possible to get connection speeds of 8,000kps (8mb). These figures put SPTC’s claim of 128kbps look ridiculous.

So the warning I give it simple. SPTC is selling you a dud. Don’t buy it. Instead, campaign for a proper Internet connection and truly join the internet superhighway.